Social Network Friending and Friendship
There are distinct groups of "friends" that one can friend on a social networking service. The notion of a social network friend does not necessarily embody the concept of friendship, although terminology has not yet evolved to distinguish the different types of social networking friends. These three categories of social networking friends are:
- friends who are actually known
- These are people that may be one's friends or family in real life, with whom one has regular interaction either on-line or off-line.
- organizational friends
- These are companies and other organizations who maintain a "friending" relationship as a contacts list.
- complete strangers
- These are social networking "friends" with whom one has no relationship at all.
Human nature is to reciprocate a friending, marking someone as a friend who has marked oneself as a friend. This is a social norm for social networking services. However, this leads to mixing up who is an actual friend, and who is a contact, not least because tagging someone as a "contact" who has marked one as a "friend" is perceived as impolite. One social networking service, FriendFeed, allows one to friend someone as a "fake" friend. The person "fake" friended receives the usual notifications for friending, but that person's updates are not received. Gavin Bell, author of Building Social Web Applications, describes this mechanism as "ludicrous".
Read more about this topic: Friending
Famous quotes containing the words social, network and/or friendship:
“In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
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—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)
“What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors—in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)